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2 Montgomery County School Districts To Require Masks Again Due To County’s COVID-19 Level

May 19, 2022 by philadelphia.cbslocal.com Leave a Comment

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Pa. (CBS) — Masks are coming back for at least two suburban Philadelphia county school districts. Both the Lower Merion School District and Cheltenham School District said Thursday night masks will now be required in all district schools and on buses beginning Friday.

The school districts cited the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 level for Montgomery County.

Due to change in CDC COVID level for Montco, masks will be required in LMSD schools/on buses starting tomorrow, Friday, May 20, 2022. pic.twitter.com/ny52syonmP

— Lower Merion SD (@LowerMerionSD) May 20, 2022

“Please remember to send your child to school with a mask. If your child doesn’t have a mask, they are available in the nurse’s suite. Once the county has returned to ‘medium’ on the data tracker, the district will pivot back to ‘mask recommended.’ We are still offering Test to Stay and Mask to Stay for eligible students and staff,” Cheltenham Superintendent of Schools Dr. Brian Scriven said in a letter sent to parents.

Montgomery County’s community COVID-19 level is listed as high , according to the CDC.

(Credit: CDC)

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The county has a 281.26 case rate per 100,000 population and 10.4 new COVID-19 admissions per 100,000 population.

No Extra Days To Be Added At End Of School Year After Sacramento Teacher Strike, District Says

May 19, 2022 by sacramento.cbslocal.com Leave a Comment

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – No extra days are being added to the school year, the Sacramento City Unified School District announced on Thursday.

The decision comes after uncertainty over the eight days of instruction that were lost when teachers went on strike.

Sac City Unified says they were not able to reach an agreement with the teachers union over making up the lost days.

“After two years in which students missed significant classroom time due to COVID, we owe them more learning time, not less,” the district said in a statement.

CBS13 is reaching out to the Sacramento City Teachers’ Association for comment.

Instead of adding days at the end of the 2021-22 year, Sac City Unified says they’re now working on a plan to add a total of 16 days of instruction over the next two years.

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The district says the 2022-23 school year is still scheduled to start on Sept. 1.

This elite Bay Area private high school is going remote as COVID infections rise

May 19, 2022 by www.sfchronicle.com Leave a Comment

An elite private high school in Oakland will go remote for the last week of classes, a precaution to stave off rising COVID-19 infections among the student body, administrators said Thursday.

Beginning Thursday morning, teachers at The College Preparatory School held classes online, hoping that the school’s 372 students would return to campus for finals on May 27, followed by in-person events to celebrate graduation.

“We’re just trying to be prudent,” Sara Sackner, the school’s director of advancement, told the Chronicle. With cases rising in the Bay Area , fueled by new, infectious variants that relentlessly spawn every four to six months, Sackner and other staff saw an opportune moment to shut down and beat back the surge.

By the middle of May health officials were reporting 2,500 coronavirus cases a day across the Bay Area — an underestimate, some experts said, because people are testing themselves at home or not getting tested at all.

Sadly, Sackner said, online education “is a skill we have had to acquire.”

She noted that although classes have shifted to computer screens, the school’s campus remains open. Sackner and other faculty worked there on Thursday.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether College Preparatory School’s decision would be a bellweather for other districts. Spokespeople for Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts were not immediately available for comment Thursday afternoon.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @rachelswan

Texas will resume grading public schools based on students’ STAAR test results

May 19, 2022 by www.chron.com Leave a Comment

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For the first time since the pandemic began, Texas public schools will be rated based on how students score on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness — more commonly known as the annual STAAR test.

It’s the latest big step toward normalcy for the state’s 8,866 public schools — which includes 782 charter schools — since the COVID-19 pandemic forced school closures in early 2020.

But this year’s ratings come with a few changes. For this year only, schools will receive an A-C rating. Districts and schools that score D or F will receive a “Not Rated” label instead. Schools who fall in those bottom tiers will also evade possible sanctions from the Texas Education Agency during the 2022-2023 school year.

The news comes as thousands of students in grades 3 through 12 are taking the exam this spring. Last year, students had the option to take the STAAR test and results were not held against them or the district.

The ratings, those letter grades affixed on school buildings across the state, are typically released by the Texas Education Agency in August. But when the coronavirus began appearing in the United States more than two years ago, schools were shut down and as a result, standardized testing school testing was canceled for the year.

The new A-C rating this year will allow districts that still have a D or F from 2019 to have a shot of getting a better grade.

Schools and districts are graded on three criteria: student achievement, student progress and how well the school is closing its learning gaps. Student achievement and progress weigh the most and STAAR results are how the agency measures progress. Students are tested on different subjects: reading, math, science and social students.

“STAAR results allow parents, teachers and schools to see how individual students are performing so they can better support those students moving forward,” Frank Ward, a TEA spokesperson said. “There is extensive evidence that the process of setting reasonable goals for schools and publicly reporting on progress towards those goals improves the kinds of academic supports our students receive.”

Last year, STAAR results showed that the pandemic had a significant impact on student learning with far lower scores than before the pandemic, especially when it came to math. Also, schools that relied more heavily on online class instruction had students who scored significantly lower than those school that were able to open and offer in-person instruction.

There’s fear that this year’s test scores may be impacted again because of pandemic-related school closures and teacher absences that occurred during surges in infection caused by the delta and omicron variants of the coronavirus.

Even though the rating system has been changed this year, not everyone is a fan of the school rating system to begin with.

Matthew Gutierrez, superintendent of the Seguin Independent School District, near San Antonio, believes the STAAR will be helpful to gauge students’ academic level, but the letter grades should’ve been postponed this school year as well because of the continued COVID-19 distruptions. Seguin, along with other districts, had teachers and substitutes out with COVID-19 during the omicron surge this past winter.

“We had students who went days without support from their certified teacher,” he said. “You had situations where you were combining classrooms and having really creative staffing, so it’s not optimal for learning.”

Gutierrez is also concerned about the “Not Rated” label. He said if a district scored an F in 2019 and then a D this school year, that district won’t get credit for that progress.

Monty Exter, a lobbyist with the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said the accountability system coupled with the STAAR test incentivizes schools to teach for the test instead of taking a holistic approach to teaching.

“Teaching people how to test is frankly a completely worthless skill,” Exter said.

Lawmakers and teacher unions called on the state to scrap the exam again for this spring, citing that teachers and administrators are still feeling the effects of the pandemic and the STAAR would put added pressure during another tumultuous year.

“The STAAR test administration is cumbersome and time-consuming,” Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, said earlier this year in a written statement. “Parents and educators share concerns about learning loss and the need to support our children after two years of disruption.”

Disclosure: Association of Texas Professional Educators has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here .

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

What rules should Baton Rouge school staff follow on social media? New policy raises questions.

May 19, 2022 by www.theadvocate.com Leave a Comment

Superintendent Sito Narcisse is asking the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board to adopt a new, far-reaching policy tightly regulating what school employees can do on social media when it comes to interacting with students and discussing their jobs and the school district.

The proposed policy, entitled “ Employee Use of Social Media ,” is scheduled to be voted on when the School Board meets at 5 p.m. Thursday. With little discussion, the board gave unanimous preliminary approval to the new policy on May 5, but some parents have raised questions about the proposed policy in the days since.

Harmony Hobbs, a parent of public schoolchildren, sees the new policy as a clear effort to muzzle employees tempted to share their concerns about their school or the school district.

“Basically, our leadership wants to be able to fire any employee who has the audacity to speak out against them on social media,” Hobbs wrote Monday in a public Facebook post . “SILENCING WILL NOT WORK.”

Benjamin Owens, another parent and a practicing attorney, said it took him just a few minutes to conclude that the proposed policy is unconstitutional and “has no prospect for surviving a legal challenge.”

“In particular, it is unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, implicates due process, and would chill speech that is protected under the First Amendment,” Owens said.

Despite such concerns, several school districts in Louisiana have similar policies for employees using social media. One of the first was the Orleans Parish School Board back in June 2016, which is almost identical to the one East Baton Rouge Parish is considering now.

Locally, Livingston Parish schools adopted a similar policy in July 2020 . Lafayette Parish schools c onsidered a version of this policy in November 2018 , but quietly dropped the idea.

Currently, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system has an array of rules about what school employees can do on school grounds and with school computers. But it does not have specific rules dealing with what employees can do on the Internet outside of school.

The school district does have a policy setting out general “standards of conduct” for employees that can be invoked if they do something questionable outside of school.

The new policy includes several new, specific employee restrictions that, if violated, could lead to discipline, up to being fired:

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No posting of confidential information about students, employees or school district business.
No posts that “libel or defame” the School Board, School Board members, school employees or students.
Any posts “related to or referencing the school district, students and other employees” must be “professional.”
No posting of “profane, pornographic, obscene, indecent, lewd, vulgar or sexually offensive language, pictures or graphics or other communication that could reasonably be anticipated to cause a substantial disruption to the school environment.”
No posts with “inappropriate content that negatively impacts their ability to perform their jobs.”
No posting of “identifiable images of a student or student’s family without permission from the student and the student’s parent or legal guardian.”
Never accept current students as “friends” or “followers” or otherwise connect with students on social media sites unless there’s a “a family relationship or other type of appropriate relationship which originated outside of the school setting.”

The policy defines social media to include personal websites, blogs, wikis, social network sites, online forums, virtual worlds and video-sharing websites. It also has a catch-all that covers “any other social media generally available to the public or consumers that does not fall within the School Board’s technologies network (e.g., Web 2.0 tools, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, Flickr, YouTube).”

Gwynn Shamlin, the board’s general counsel, told the School Board on May 5 that he helped develop the new policy after getting a request from Nichola Hall, chief officer for human resources.

“This looks at our employee’s use of social media, which can happen outside our system, including the internet and use of email,” Shamlin said. “So this is the use of platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

Shamlin said the policy was developed in order not to violate employee rights.

“We had to walk a bit of a tight rope developing this because there are free speech issues you have to be careful with,” Shamlin said.

In his letter, Owens notes that a judge on May 10 struck down an employee policy used by Jackson Public Schools in Jackson, Mississippi that has similarities to the one East Baton Rouge is considering. In that case, the judge ruled that the rules that the policy there violated the Mississippi state constitution , “but also that they gravely threaten the public interest in public education.”

“By silencing its teachers, staff, employees, and their organizational advocate, JPS deprives its students, their parents, and other interested parties such as legislators and taxpayers, of important information necessary to fully understand and take part in their public education system, and meaningfully call for its improvement where and when needed,” special Circuit Judge Jess Dickinson wrote in the ruling.

In Louisiana, the City of New Orleans recently settled litigation over an employee social media policy in a case brought in 2020 by two public library workers who said the policy violated their First Amendment rights. As part of the settlement, the city government removed the most controversial aspects of the previous policy, including a provision that said city employees are not allowed to “engage or respond to negative or disparaging posts” about city government.

Katie Schwartzmann, director of the Tulane University Law School First Amendment Clinic , helped represent those two city employees. She said the City of New Orleans policy was different in key ways, but she said the proposed policy in East Baton Rouge raises several potential First Amendment concerns for her. For instance, the policy does not define “professional” when it comes to what employees post on the internet and could be used to target otherwise protected free speech.

“What does it mean to be professional and does that purport to cover criticism of otherwise public matters?” Schwartzmann said.